Pro Jakarta Commons

Rating:
Summary: Clear and concise
Review: I recommend this book. It offers a good overview of the Commons components and lots of examples of their usage. I especially liked the fact that it offers examples that you can apply to your daily work.

Rating:
Summary: Good, not great
Review: I was already familiar with the Jakarta Commons by the time I read this book, so I didn't get that much out of it. It is well written though, and full of good technical stuff.

If you are new to the Commons then I might recommend it to you; but the material in here is available from http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/index.html and it will stay 'fresh' on the website, as opposed to this book. I'd point you to there first. If you are looking for another 'roadmap' or organization of the material, then this book is for you.

If you are already familiar with the Jakarta Commons, pass on this book.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to Jakarta Commons
Review: Jakarta Commons is a collection of generally unrelated but useful classes that can be incorporated into any Java project. In general, the documentation available is limited at best and in some cases is limited to little more than the Javadoc from the API. This lack of good documentation has helped to prevent the widespread acceptance of the Commons classes. This book will help to address that major shortcoming of the Jakarta Commons.

This book is an introduction to the most commonly used classes found in Jakarta Commons. Not all the components are covered. For example, Betwixt, Jelly, Jexl, and Codec are barely mentioned. However, the components that the author discusses are the most useful and are generally well covered. The book starts off slowly with an introduction to Jakarta Commons and then a brief and incomplete look at the Lang component. This chapter will give you no more than a flavor of what is available. The Logging component is well covered although I would probably never use it and the coverage of the Validator component should have concentrated solely on implementation outside of Struts and left Struts explanations to books on Struts. The remaining chapters cover the more useful components including Digester, Pooling, BeanUtils, and FileUpload and do a great job of explaining the components and providing realistic examples of usage.

Anyone who is writing Java code should be interested in the Jakarta Commons and anyone who is interested in Jakarta Commons should have a copy of this book. It will serve both as a good introduction to Commons components and a reference to using those components.


Rating:
Summary: Nice work.
Review: Mr. Harshad Oak did what usually open source developers don't.. write some good documentation. Jakarta commons has incomplete documentation. Now with author's work i'm able to develop code without the feel of "reinventing the weel".
The author did a very good job focusing on the right key-points of the jakarta commons api. It is very readable even for non native english speakers. I did rate five stars but i would rate it to 4.5 stars because i think that it is not completly exaustive. I would have enjoyed some deeper discussion about the commons api. But it could be seen in another way: a quick and not verbose starting point for using the commons library.
Anyway i did really enjoy my purchase.

Rating:
Summary: good coverage of some very useful Java components
Review: On reading this book, I see that I was almost reinventing the wheel every day on my project. Using lots of Jakarta Commons components and writing as little custom code as possible, is the way to go. These small Commons components pack quite a punch and the author does a good job of showing how one can quickly get up to speed with the components and minimize writing custom code.

Rating:
Summary: good, solid and amazingly simple
Review: pro jakarta commons is a very well written book. It does supply explanation for most common libraries that handle simple day to day tasks. Pro Jakarta Commons should be a mandatory read for every Java developer since it answers loads of questions, and makes everyone more efficient.

Validation, parsing, emailing, beans handling, stringutils, you name it and it is all there, and good suiting examples are shown.
E.g the XML validator component is explained in such simplicity that while reading everyone will understand how to do it. Exactly at the right moment Harshad points to more complex xml schema and how to solve those issues. After writing many sax-parsers I have to say that I simply feel stupid that I have spent so much time on such a simple task. I do however feel that he should have gone that little bit further in his example. In a real life, no supplied XML is always correct. Even though the book mentions that you can validate the XML by using the setValidating method, it does not mention what happens when validation fails. Also it does not mention what happens when the incoming XML is structurally incorrect, and parsing is commencing.

All in all, this is an excellent book, worth a 4 and a half star.

Rating:
Summary: A good introduction of Jakarta Commons
Review: The lack Open Source books in some areas often is the main cause that programmers write the same code over and over.

I found the book to be a good introduction to the Jakarta commons libraries. While it is very dificult to cover the wide range of jakarta commons in just cca. 200 pages, the author made a selection of what he think it was the most important topics:

Lang, Logging, Validator, BeanUtils, pool, dbcp, Digester, collections, primitives, httpclient, fileupload, net, dbutils, codec, jxpath, discovery.

Some topics are covered in more deep than others. For example JXPath covered in just cca. 5 pages is not a worth. The "fast reviewed" topics are:

dbutils, codec, jxpath, discovery.

All in all, I think the book is an good introduction to of Jakarta commons libraries.

A worth buy to anyone trying to save time by reusing the excelent code written for one of the most recognized communities in the Open Source world: The Apache Software Foundation.

Rating:
Summary: good guide to the best of Jakarta Commons
Review: This book is a very good guide to the best of Jakarta Commons. The book has lots of useful examples that illustrate how the various components can be used for real world Java and J2EE development.

The book info on Amazon is insufficient. (...)

Rating:
Summary: good examples - useful book
Review: this book is very useful. It has lots of examples that demonstrated the how and why of the Commons components. The explanations of some of the more complex components is also quite good. Just using all the examples and seeeing what all is possible was worth the money as I expect that this information will save me and my team a lot of time and effort.

Rating:
Summary: This is a must have for Java Developers
Review: This is a must have book for Java Developers. I already have found many components/code that I can reuse to make my life easier. For example, the File Upload component is simple to use and saves a great amount of coding. The XML component (Digester) is fantastic! The author writes to the point and shows great examples. The examples on the Jakarta Commons website are lacking, so this is why this book is needed!